[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
DAM-L LS: Doing The Atrophy (fwd)
----- Forwarded message from owner-irn-narmada@netvista.net -----
Return-path: <owner-irn-narmada@netvista.net>
Received: from DaVinci.NetVista.net (mjdomo@mail.netvista.net [206.170.46.10])
by lox.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca (8.8.7/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA04476
for <dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>; Fri, 31 Aug 2001 13:35:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: owner-irn-narmada@netvista.net
Received: [(from mjdomo@localhost)
by DaVinci.NetVista.net (8.10.0/8.8.8) id f7VH7EG08382
for irn-narmada-list; Fri, 31 Aug 2001 10:07:14 -0700 (PDT)
(envelope-from owner-irn-narmada@netvista.net)]
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 10:07:14 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <200108311707.f7VH7EG08382@DaVinci.NetVista.net>
Subject: LS: Doing The Atrophy
Sender: owner-irn-narmada@netvista.net
Precedence: bulk
http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/aug/30dilip.htm
Dilip D'Souza
Doing The Atrophy
Upset at the death of a party leader who had been badly hurt in a car
accident, a gang of Shiv Sena members burns cars, beats up and nearly kills
journalists. They vandalize the hospital, yes, the hospital, where he died.
Question: Are these hospital-vandalizers a threat to national security? In
Delhi earlier this year, several powerful men were filmed taking money and
demanding sex -- even having the sex they demanded -- for putting through
defence deals. Question: Are these sex-demanders a threat to national
security?
I don't know. But a young Canadian woman I met last year on the banks of an
Indian river, a woman who sang and chanted slogans with several hundred
villagers of the area, who spent several months living among ordinary
Indians because she was concerned about their future and wanted to learn
about their hopes and fears -- now that young woman, she's certainly a
threat to national security. She was told as much at the airport in New
Delhi one day last July. She landed there that day, but was immediately
deported back to Canada.
Long live national security. I feel safer already. I feel safer knowing that
men who ransack hospitals are running around free and untouched, while a
twenty-something Canadian woman is prevented from even entering the country.
Ali Sauer believes in the Narmada Bachao Andolan and in what it is fighting
for. Last year, she followed her beliefs halfway around the world: she came
to join the Narmada Bachao Andolan's monsoon satyagraha in little villages
strung along the banks of the swollen river. Tall, long-haired and cheerful,
her steady enthusiasm and spirit were infectious. When I met her in
Jalsindhi, she was in a cotton kurta, swaying gently to the drums the
villagers beat, to their songs that washed around us. In Domkhedi early the
next morning, she joined in as several dozen of us watched the sun rise,
singing softly: Kya Ram hai, kya Rahim hai ... vikas ki sahi soch ho, is
mein hi Ram Rahim ho. (My far less eloquent translation: 'Thoughts about
real progress: that's where Ram and Rahim truly are').
I mention all these details not to paint some precious picture of an
India-besotted belle traipsing through the hills and dales of rural India in
be-flowered bellbottoms. I mention them to make the point that a person less
likely than Ali Sauer to do harm to India would be hard to imagine. Yet that
must just be my imagination atrophying away, because my venerable
government, in its wisdom, has determined that Ali is indeed a threat to us
all. Its airport officials, she reports, "led me through the airport under
intense security and put me on a plane that was just leaving for Muscat."
The episode, she goes on, "was heartbreaking, terrifying [and] made me feel
utterly powerless."
Then again, at just about the same time Ali was flung out of India, the very
same government was preparing to officially welcome a man it spent most of
two years blaming for the deaths of 500 Indian soldiers. That it repeatedly
referred to as our country's implacable enemy. Yes, only days after Ali
Sauer was turned away at India's door, Pervez Musharraf walked through that
same door -- that same airport in Delhi -- and into India.
Which, let me say quickly, is exactly as it should have been. But I can't
help wondering if the question occurred to Ali: they call me a threat to
national security, but they roll out the wall-to-wall for this man they
themselves say inflicted war on India?
And then there's the mob in Thane. When a man called Anand Dighe died in the
Singhania hospital there last weekend, the crowd that had gathered
"spontaneously" expressed their "grief." Some grief. They destroyed the
ground floor of the hospital. They looted and burned a Raymonds showroom
nearby, then burned a godown opposite. They stole the petrol from several
ambulances, overturned them and set them on fire. They smashed over 30 cars
in the hospital compound, and three buses outside. They assaulted several
journalists; two from the television programme Aaj Tak escaped death only by
falling to the ground and feigning it. They chased nurses and patients all
over the building, trying to batter down the doors they hid fearfully
behind. One patient who had to run for his life was suffering from renal
failure and had actually been in the bed adjacent to Dighe in the ICU. "I
had given up hope," his son told Mid-Day. "I thought I would lose my
father."
To escape the mayhem, several patients were shifted to other hospitals.
Given that the men in the mob claim reverence for a giant of Indian history,
it must have struck the patients as gut-wrenchingly ironic that one of those
hospitals is named 'Chhatrapati Shivaji.'
By any definition, all this carnage threatened several Indian lives. I
cannot imagine a more fitting example of a threat to national security than
men who destroy hospitals -- not even enemies do that during wars -- and
chase feeble patients from their beds in the ICU. But, of course, that's
just my imagination doing the atrophy again. For apparently the party they
belonged to -- for whom the Thane episode is just the most recent of many --
is considered guardian enough of this thing called national security that it
is actually part of our government.
And I wonder again if the thought occurred to Ali Sauer: when such men form
the government, why, naturally that government will pronounce me a threat to
national security.
If you turn it over in your mind, you will find lots of thoughts that might
have occurred to Ali. The dudes who lower their pants before they will sign
defence deals, but whose punishment must wait for an inquiry and then,
maybe, a court case -- meaning it must wait forever. The woman who now
reigns once more over Tamil Nadu, but who is famed for innumerable
corruption cases that are no closer to completion than when they started.
The strongmen of Delhi whose names crop up in inquiry after inquiry into the
1984 massacre of Sikhs, but who have escaped justice for 17 years now; who
live, in fact and ironically, under a tight "security" that the victims'
families pay for. The men whose chariot rides and repugnant editorials
fuelled murderous riots in our biggest city, but who are now, respectively,
our country's home minister and our country's finest self-proclaimed
patriot. (And patriarch of hospital-vandals too).
Despite the misery they have caused in their own ways to thousands upon
thousands of Indians, none of these people must be considered a threat to
our national security. Oh no. How can they be? Far from being threats, they
actually go on to govern us. To make and administer our laws.
But a tall young lady from Canada? Deport her at once.
Ali wanted to join this monsoon's NBA satyagraha on the banks of the
Narmada. I hardly mean to draw comparisons that she herself would laugh off.
Still, I do remember other men and women from across the seas who, inspired
by India and Indians, came here to join a much earlier satyagraha. C F
Andrews, Miraben and Verrier Elwin are only three. Foreigners all, they
became exemplary Indians, and I don't mean that in the narrow sense of
citizenship. Nor, certainly, do I mean that in the sense of smashing
hospitals as a horde of very exemplary Indians did in Thane.
No, if understanding India counts for anything, if learning and caring about
Indians counts for anything, if working shoulder-to-shoulder with Indians
for the freedom of this country counts for anything -- by those measures,
Andrews, Miraben and Elwin were Indians to inspire us all. Not even the
British -- whose very rule over India they deplored -- called them threats
to our national security.
And if we tolerate the events in Thane while we deport Ali Sauer, it seems
to me we choke the life out of all that those Indians fought for.
Dilip D'Souza
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to majordomo@netvista.net
with no subject and the following text in the body of the message
"unsubscribe irn-narmada".
----- End of forwarded message from owner-irn-narmada@netvista.net -----